I'm a new InDesign user. When I try to place certain jpgs, they just turn the picture box black. Other jpgs come in just fine. I've tried to figure out the difference the pictures that import and the ones that don't, but they look the same to me.

First check the picture outside of ID. Can the image be viewed by the OS? If so, follow my second advice. If not, it may not be a corrrect JPEG image, but then I doubt you can place it.

Right click the image (even if black) and choose fitting image to frame. I suspect the DPI value in the file being very low, the file being a high resolution image so that the resulting size of the image is to huge for fitting the frame. It shows only part of the image and that part may be black.

ID looks into the header info of the picture to get the intended display size. That display size is influenced by the DPI parameter which influences the size in cm or inches of the picture for a given resolution. ID can cope with any DPI value and the value is not important for being able to use the picture. For reasons beyond this explanation however, it is usefull to have the size in inches or cm at a correct value.

I tried replying earlier, but it didn't seem to work. Not only can't I work InDesign, but I can't manage the Adobe forum either.

I tried several of the things you mentioned, but nothing worked. Here's some additional info: I'm working on a template, and what I'm doing is replacing one picture with another. So there may be something going on that I can't see. Also, I was able to import a color photo from that folder into that picture box, but when I changed it from color to grayscale in photoshop, I was unable to place it. Very strange.

When you say, "nothing worked", please be more specific. What exactly did you try, and what, exactly, were the results. It's hard for us to make guesses, sometimes, without better information and / or screenshots to pinpoint what is going on.

1. Did you convert to tiff? How? What were the results?

2. What is the ppi of the image?

3. Did you select Fit to Frame? What were the results?

4. When you changed the image to grayscale, how did you do it? What format did you save it in? What is the extension?

And those screenshots, with the title bar!

(Otherwise, we continue to make generic guesses, and you don't want that!)

1. Yes I did convert this picture to TIFF in Photoshop, and the results were the same.

2. The picture is 251.4 K. It is 2 inches by 1.43 inches with a resolution of 300. It is 600 pixels by 429 pixels.

3. It did try fit to frame. I tried every button there. Nothing worked

4. I changed an image (not the one in these screen shots) to grayscale in Photoshop in the usual way. I saved it as a JPG, which it already was. The extension was .jpg. I only mention this because when it was a color photo, it imported. When it was a black and white photo, it did not.

jane-e has reminded me there is a bug in the 11.4 release that affects colorized grayscale photos, and there may be a connection to this problem as well. Does it change if you turn on Overprint Preview?

I was able to replicate the situation in (MacOSX) CS5. The problem is in the way inDesign places the grayscale images - it somehow applies black fill to the placed image which than blends with black fill of frame. - No effects/blending modes are applied.

The work around can be to have two frames above each other and have the photo be placed in the top frame with no fill (of frame) and bottom frame to have the black fill...